“… from Albemarle are coming,” Lewis was saying, and Jonathan came back as if from a reverie, strangely wistful and lonely. “Mister Lawrence rode with us a while, but hurried on ahead a while ago—at a gallop, actually—claiming that he was very, very thirsty. We offered him water, but apparently that wasn’t what he was thirsty for. D’you remember Lawrence? ’Twas he who bought your father’s farm in Albemarle.”
“Aye. Him I remember. He owned an Indian boy, didn’t he?” Jonathan could remember the boy, a sad-faced wretch who had befriended George and made him a bow and arrows. Those two had learned to converse in some strange, made-up tongue. Jonathan had not developed any such affinity for the little savage, but George … Well, sometimes George seemed to Jonathan more Indian than Virginian.
“I’m not sure anyone ever ‘owns’ an Indian,” Lewis said. “Not enough to keep the little heathen from running off one day. Near broke old Lawrence’s heart, it did, him having tried so hard to make him a proper Christian.”
“Hm. Here, Mister Lewis, Ma’am, here we turn. This is the place, and let me be the first to bid you welcome to it. Ah, but I do love coming home!”
Children whom Jonathan didn’t know were running, squealing,
among the trees along the drive. In front of the house Cupid, in livery, was bowing and helping two feeble old gentlemen down from a chaise whose driver sat with upright whip and an air of importance. From the open front door of the house came a drone of many voices, talking, laughing voices, and now and then a loud guffaw or the excited squeal of a girl. He knew the family certainly must be busy with company; usually he was seen and hailed before he was halfway up the drive Now Cupid saw him, and broke into an ivory grin, but said nothing and continued to hand the elderly passengers down from the chaise.
“There’s Jonathan!” he heard Edmund’s voice shout from somewhere in the house, and then, before he could dismount, he saw the family boiling out the door to meet him.
“Hullo! Hullo,” he cried, dropping to the ground and taking hugs. “Ma, look, I’ve guided the Lewises in. Hey, Pa! And, say! How d’ye, Billy?” The little lad was looking critically at him, studying his plain, dark apparel. “Nothing t’ say, eh? Ha, ha! Hey, Annie, y’ look like you’re about to have an apoplexy! Is Owen here yet, eh? Maybe there’s time yet to talk ’im out o’ this foolishness.”
“Oh, you!”
“A cup! Quick, get this man a cup!” Dickie was exclaiming. He looked a bit cockeyed, and had apparently been greeting many guests with toasts at the sideboard.
“Lucy Meriwether! Heavens, you were but a child when last I saw ye.”
“Nor’ve I grown much, Mrs. Clark, but I’ve two little ’uns, even littler’n me,” laughed that thrilling voice, and Jonathan was aware of it even in the crush and babble. He saw her descend from the saddle onto the mounting block, a cascade of dusty skirts. And then Brother Johnny’s handsome face appeared, and Jonathan hugged him and pounded him on the back, and Johnny too was redolent of peach brandy.
Then they were inside, moving through the hallway, through a gauntlet of half-remembered names, Cabells and Campbells, Redds and Putnams and Purdies and Todds, and of course Rogerses and more Rogerses, of faces familiar but older, of handshakes, callused or soft, of exclamations about how much or how little he had changed. And here was Parson Robertson, his beloved old teacher, thin and dry-skinned and wet-eyed with a long, fond look at his prize pupil. And then finally they were at the sideboard, and he was clinking glasses with his family in the usual toast to homecoming, and the delightful heat of the liquor was spreading down his gorge while the fruity fumes lingered in his head. He looked into the moist, crinkling eyes of his father, who sighed and rocked on his toes and said:
“Well, son, y’re here! Here for the event!”
“Here I am! Your last letter told me in about eight ways that I’d better be. Ha, ha! And ye know who I am: your most dutiful son. Home for a wedding and birthdays! Aye!”
John Clark beamed with pleasure. Jonathan was his favorite son, if he would admit he had a favorite. “So, you remembered our birthdays too! Ah. Shame you missed George. He was here and gone so quick I wasn’t sure I’d really seen—”
“Oh, but I didn’t miss ’im.”
“What sayee?”
“You saw George?” asked Mrs. Clark.
“He detoured up by Woodstock t’ see me on his way back west. Didn’t he say he would?” Jonathan was stroking his sister Lucy’s red curls as she stood close and embraced his waist.
“Why, no! Why, that’s a considerable detour,” exclaimed John Clark.
“Aye. Showed up all a surprise as usual. Said ’e was goin’ to cut up over and take the old Nemacolin Trace to Fort Pitt. Always has to try a new way, as y’ know. Lookee what he brought me from Williamsburg. How could he afford a fine fob like this? I never figured him to make a shilling, that blamed hill-hopper!” Jonathan did not mention that he had forgotten his parents’ birthdays until George had reminded him.
“Well, well-a-well,” said Mrs. Clark, looking at the fob as Jonathan slipped it back into his waistcoat. Smiling with a private satisfaction, she turned to the Lewises, to lead them up to the room where they’d be staying. She glanced down from the stairs at Jonathan and her husband, who still stood talking to each other in the crowded hallway.
Someday, she was thinking, someday they’ll esteem my George as he deserves t’ be. Someday. Perhaps.
“D
O YOU
, O
WEN
,”
SAID
R
EVEREND
A
RCHIBALD
D
ICK, RECTOR
of the Parish of St. Margaret’s, “take this woman, Ann, to be your lawful wedded wife, to love, honor, and cherish, so long as you both shall live?”
“I do.” Owen’s voice rumbled deep and gentle, and it was a reassuring voice.
To Ann Rogers Clark, it was the sound of reliability; it was the voice of a man of solidity, like her husband John Clark, whose broad back she was now watching through blurry eyes. She felt Billy stir beside her and she patted his arm to keep him from fidgeting. Around her hushed the breathing and snuffling and whispering of a hundred people or perhaps more, and near the back of the church there were the little knockings and scrapings made by latecomers creeping in, and outside she could hear horses and harness. People from distant Albemarle had kept coming in through the morning, many of them having been up before daylight to ride the last twenty or thirty miles from wherever they had slept along the roads. She had not thought so many of them would come, but they were there, in the pews behind her; she could smell horse and dust on them, and some reeked already of corn whiskey, which, she knew, they sometimes would start the day with if they had no fires for tea or coffee. She was profoundly touched that so many had come, so many of these rough and earthy people out of her family’s distant past. It appealed to something in her to think of their muddy buckskins and homespuns intermingled with the satins and velvets and watered silks of the Caroline gentry. Some of the guests from Albemarle could remember when Annie the bride had been born, or professed they could, and probably believed it, but the real reason they were here was their old friendship for John Clark. Many of John Clark’s friends had been his friends for thirty or forty years, and to his wife that was another proof that he was as good a man as she knew he was.
She kept looking at him as Reverend Dick’s fluty voice led on through the ceremony. She looked at John’s broad back in its black wool frock, and the black ribbon that bound the queue of his gray-flecked hair behind his collar, as he stood beside his—their—daughter.
“Do you, Ann, take this man Owen to be your lawful wedded husband, to love …”
That strong back of John’s, and her own fruitful loins, had made their world, in the quarter of a century since she and John had said these same vows. Now for a moment, as she heard Annie’s beloved voice quaver, “I do,” her own body remembered what it had felt like to be a bride’s body: elastic, resilient, vibrant with hopeful desires. And then the feelings of her age returned: of flesh stretched and collapsed, of twinges of pain deep in her organs, of bruised nipples and milk-heavy dugs, of back and legs
perpetually weary. Annie, that wan virgin in lace standing up there now with her head bowed toward big Owen’s shoulder, that Annie would one day house in her body all such familiar infirmities, would be tough inside instead of tender.
Ann Rogers Clark sighed aloud, but no one heard the sigh because the people were suddenly all astir; it was over, and cloth was swishing and shoes were scuffing, voices were talking and sobbing and laughing, and she came out of her reverie and the first thing she saw was husband John turning to look at her, his eyes all shimmery, too, and his face engorged with the strain of not weeping aloud, and she was sure that he likewise had been thinking about themselves, about the flow of time.
And the second thing she saw was Annie’s face, which was intent upon the ruddy, self-conscious face of Owen Gwathmey, her husband from this moment on. Billy’s hand was tugging, and he was asking something about “awful wedded husband,” but people were closing in now, cooing congratulations to her, and Jonathan’s voice was trying to joke by her ear, “… get used to it, Ma, y’ve got nine more weddings to go.”
While in the back of the church a huge uproar was building, with men’s voices roaring and whooping, and the sounds of bodies thumping and doorjambs quaking as half the Albemarle men tried to squeeze through the door at once and get to their horses. She could hear Mr. Lawrence’s voice bellowing, “RACE FOR TH’ JUG! YEEEAH-HAH!”
“RACE FOR TH’ JUG!” other voices howled, and the commotion moved outside to the hitchrails under the oaks. Horses were whinnying and quirts swishing and voices yodeling and then hooves were thundering off down the road toward the Chesterfield Tavern, where there awaited a jug of hard spirits previously bought and set aside in preparation for this traditional wedding-day race. The tavern was a league nearer the church than was the Clark house, and thus had been selected as a way station for any guests who feared they might perish of thirst on the way to the reception. Though the Race for the Jug was an old Albemarle tradition and appeared to have been arranged by that contingent of the guests, several of Caroline County’s fancy young bucks caught on at once and sprinted to their horses. Caroline County was famous for its racing horses and riders, and these youths had no intention of being outrun on their own countryside by a company of frontier rustics. In a moment a troop of them, mostly friends and peers of the older Clark boys, were pounding away in pursuit, their elegant coattails flying. Knowing the county better, they veered off through a field to
make a shortcut. Thus the race had all the look and spirit of a cavalry maneuver, and even before the two contingents were out of sight through the blazing reds and yellows of the autumn foliage, some of the older wedding guests were already on the church stoop, placing wagers. “They can’t help it, Lord, forgive them,” Reverend Dick said aloud. “It’s in their blood.” He was trying to look disapproving, but a smile kept flickering on his narrow young face.
In the meantime the bride and groom had been glad-handed and kissed all down the crowded aisle and onto the church lawn, where a carriage with driver waited to convey them to the Clark house. Behind it stood John Clark’s own chaise. Owen and Annie were lifted bodily from the ground and placed in the carriage and the driver was ordered to make all haste to the Clark house, without stopping, or even slowing, at the tavern. The driver’s whip swished, and the carriage darted forward so quickly that the couple’s heads bobbed back, and they were off at a run with the crowd cheering behind them. John Clark within seconds had his wife and small children in his carriage, and they too were spanking along the road in that gleaming, fresh-painted vehicle, one of the lightest and best-made in the county. Ann Rogers Clark waved back at the mob outside the church, and saw them all making for their own horses or carriages, before they faded from sight in the road dust.
John Clark was no breakneck fool who would jeopardize his family for the sake of speed, but he was as much at home on or behind horses as on his own feet, and his horses were fine ones, and so his progress homeward was enough to fan the locks around his children’s cheeks, and he was a long way down the road before sons Johnny, Dickie, and Edmund could catch up and gallop past on their own horses. They grinned at him as they pulled ahead, and Dickie shouted back: “A shilling, Pa, says I’ll pass Owen!”
“A shilling it is!” cried John Clark.
Lucy was grinning into the wind, gap-toothed, Elizabeth sat in the crook of her mother’s arm half-smiling and watching the roadside whiz by, and Billy stared after his brothers, his little freckled snub nose turned up in the breeze and his eyes half-closed. The carriage rumbled smoothly as John Clark steered past the dips and ruts of the road, and the two big geldings in the harness ran with manes and tails streaming, their powerful sleek rumps working. “Happy day, Mama!” Lucy cried from sheer exuberance.
“Oh, yes, it is indeed!” cried Ann Rogers Clark, feeling young
again. Her husband laughed with his high spirits, and then called back:
“Lookee! Lawrence got the jug!”
“Heavens, already?”
The old Albermarle bachelor had come pelting back up the road whip-and-spur, waving the jug he had snatched up at the tavern, and met the bridal carriage head-on, yelling its driver to a halt. And when Squire John Clark drew his vehicle alongside, old Lawrence was leaning sideways off his prancing horse, passing the jug to Owen Gwathmey, crying, “Your first swig as a husband, poor fellow! The first o’ many to lament your lost liberty!” Owen took it with a laugh and sucked long at its neck while Dickie and Johnny and Edmund raced around and around the stopped carriages, laughing and asking for their turn.
“What o’ my shilling, Pa?” Dickie shouted.
“Aye, what of it? Ye didn’t pass ’im, he stopped to drink!”